Multi-vendor UNIX Administration

Delegates should have an existing knowledge of a UNIX editors, file manipulation, data handling and have familiarity with shell scripting with, ideally, several months practical experience of working in a UNIX environment.

Delegates will learn how to

Use responsibly the privileges of UNIX administrative user, the 'superuser'
Identify system requirements and software installation issues
Make effective use of system logs and diagnostic tools
Analyse hard disk partitioning/slicing and creating file systems
Alter and customise the start-up sequence of a UNIX system
Manage the UNIX file system, file and directory attributes
Add and delete users whilst implementing the security principles and techniques
Back up and restore portions of the file system using various tools and methods
Set up and administer the UNIX printing service
Set up file sharing among systems using NFS and use common TCP/IP utilities
Create automated task scheduling
Perform simple system diagnostics

This Multi-Vendor UNIX Administration course will provide the delegates with transferable skills, and – equally important – will give them appreciation of working in a multi-vendor UNIX environment. The course concentrates on the common philosophy and approach to administering UNIX whilst looking at some specific areas of particular systems and variants and pointing out some specific differences with BSD, for example IBM/AIX.

The platform used for practical exercises is UnixWare – the most traditional SVR4 version of UNIX – an ideal 'common denominator' to base a multi-vendor work on. There is an SSH access provided to at least one other version of UNIX, for example HP-UX.

Throughout the course, numerous vendor comparison tables, illustrations and references are provided.

Practical sessions reinforce the theory taught and account for nearly half the course. They invite the user to perform typical administration functions encountered in a real networked UNIX environment, emphasising system security and problem solution.